Drifting and striding, in Hollywood and elsewhere, with Geoff Nicholson - author of The Lost Art of Walking, and Walking in Ruinswithcholson, author of Toff Nidrifting and stomping withcholson, author of The Lost Art of Walking, considers the narrower and wider shores of obsessive pedestrianism.

Wednesday, May 10, 2017

My Richard Long post brought up a couple of things.First, Steve Duffy reminds me (and I probably
shouldn’t have needed reminding) of Bill Drummond’s Iceland/Richard Long adventures.If the story is to be believed, and with Bill
Drummond it may not be, in 1970 he and his sister tried,
but failed, to walk the length of Iceland, North to South. I’m not sure exactly what route they intended
to take, but whichever way they went would have been 550 plus kilometers, and
he was only 17 years old at the time, so failure was perhaps to be expected.

In 1970, Richard Long would have been 25 years
old and had already done a certain amount of walking and art making – A Line Made By Walking is from 1967, but
he wasn’t a household word, even the artiest of households.A Line
Made By Walking looks like this:

In 1994
Long successfully walked the length of Iceland, taking the same route that Drummond
had attempted: Drummond is the source of that bit of information, and I assume
Long had never heard of Drummond or his failed walking expedition.

During that Icelandic walk, and afterwards,
Long created works inspired by the trip, including a photography and text piece
called A Smell Of Sulphur In The Wind.It looks (or I suppose looked – since we have
to use the past tense) like this:

In 1995 Drummond bought the work for $20,000 (the
price was in dollars since that’s the international art currency), but three 3
years later he’d gone off it, so he tried to sell it for what he’d paid – and couldn’t
find a buyer.Well, there is such a thing as a gallery
mark-up.

Ever the provocateur, in 2001 when he published
and publicized his book How To Be An
Artist, Drummond tried to sell the work again, this time by cutting it up into
20,000 separate numbered segments (each one approximately 10mm x 4mm) and
selling them for $1 each.You can still
buy them for that price at Drummond live events, or you can buy them online, via
a third party, for five quid a time, the extra money covering “administration
and registration.”

Once the last segment’s been sold, Drummond
will supposedly take the $20,000, attempt the walk again and (assuming he
succeeds, at least in part) he’ll bury the money in the center of the
stone circle depicted in the Richard Long photograph, again assuming it’s still
there.

I’m not sure this Bill Drummond project constitutes great art but it
does sound like fun, a bit of a lark, and larkishness is in pretty short supply
in the art world. Long is apparently deeply unamused by Drummond slicing up his work.

I wonder how Long feels about Carey Young who is reworking or
reinterpreting (or something) his art in what strike me as some fairly
uninteresting ways One piece is titledBody Techniques (after A
Line in Ireland, Richard Long, 1974), from 2007.It looks like this:

Richard Long’s A Line in Ireland looks like this:

Would you like to hear what it says on Young’s
website about her piece?Well of course
you would.“Body Techniques (2007) is a series of eight photographs that
considers the interrelationships between art and globalized commerce. The title
of the series refers to a phrase originally coined by Marcel Mauss and
developed by Pierre Bourdieu as habitus, which describes how an operational
context or behavior can be affected by institutions or ideologies.”

It’s a striking photograph - she’s in the United
Arab Emirates apparently – and I always approve of wearing a suit in the
desert, and it’s not hard to “get” the work - Long’s Irish rocks are “natural”
while the path Young’s navigating consists of “manmade” discarded concrete.But you know, where’s the
walking?

There’s also Young’s Lines Made by Walking, a 2003, a looped slide projection
sequence. Some of it looks like this:

Again her website describes it
in ways I couldn’t possibly manage. “The
viewer sees Carey Young, dressed in a suit, walking backwards and forwards in a
crowd of commuters. … This action is repeated this (sic) until we realize that
her repeated walking appears, in fact, to be ‘inscribing’ a line in the crowd.
The artist appears to be restaging works by the Situationists as much as
Richard Long, particularly his ‘A Line Made by Walking’ much as her activity can
also be read as that of a the clockwork toy or caged animal pacing in
captivity. She appears as if displaced, or within a different temporal
continuum: the artist appears to be repeating the workers’ daily journey but at
a faster speed. Her struggles to create a space within the crowd could be seen
as a deadpan parallel for artistic ‘struggle’. The artwork appears balanced
between two states, as confined as the daily monotony of the commuters’ journey
and as some kind of free act hidden within monotony, but equally within its own
modes of institutionalization.”

Deadpan indeed.God it must be awful to be a contemporary
visual artist.Part of the gig involves
describing, or having other people describe, what you do in language so inert,
so exhausted, so pretentious and hollow, that it’s rendered meaningless. It seems to me that a robust sense of humor, a
sense of the absurd, a lack of pomposity, is quite handy when you’re making art.Bill Drummond has those qualities in spades.Those same qualities also come in no less when
you’re walking, if you ask me.